Fix the root, not the fruit

The Internet has destroyed our ability to seek truth. "Abundance" won't save us. Being honest about the role of media might.

I've been thinking about a particular moment in 2016, back in saner times. During the Clinton / Trump campaign, both candidates were trying to win over the 4 electoral college votes in West Virginia. Historically, WVa has flip-flopped red and blue. But it hadn't voted blue since 1996, when a different Clinton was on the ballot. The state had slowly become more red over time; by 2016, there was no doubt about which way it would vote. Still, both Clinton and Trump did campaign stops in the state.

Something worth knowing about West Virginia: it's deep coal country. I'm not sure exactly what percent of the ~1.8M people in the state depended on coal jobs. But Wikipedia lists a whopping 511 coal towns in the state. You don't have to be a genius to figure out how those folks were doing. Coal consumption in the US has been dropping steadily since 2007. There's a culture war angle — coal is by far the worst energy source from a climate perspective, releasing tons of pollutants and greenhouse gasses when burned. But it's also just not as efficient as other things. Fracking made natural gas significantly more abundant, while renewables continued to improve and eat away at the margins. Suffice to say 2016 West Virginia coal country was struggling, much like the rest of Appalachia. The candidate's performance in WVa would reach critical ears in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

The 2016 campaign had a lot of memorable moments. Mostly Trump saying vile, disgusting bullshit, like "I think I’d get along very well with Vladimir Putin. I just think so.", "Jeb Bush has to like the Mexican Illegals because of his wife", "I like people that weren’t captured, OK?”. But the one that stood out to me the most was when Clinton stood up in front of a town hall in West Virginia and said:

"So for example, I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right? And we're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don't want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on."

You can watch the clip here.

You can say that this was a gaffe — and in some sense, it definitely was. Clinton's particular word choice came back to haunt her, and she tried to walk it back later by claiming her words were taken out of context.

But in a much more real sense, she was telling the truth. Coal was dying, and the sickness was terminal. It was obvious back in 2016 to the economists and energy engineers and finance people and anyone who had a view into the way the macroeconomic world was swinging. Someone had to break it to the poor saps still down in the mines. Now, Clinton's main mistake was coming to coal country and assuming that those folks didn't like their jobs. But from a policy perspective, that particular display of elitism is totally irrelevant to the reality on the ground. People in WVa were losing jobs, they were going to continue losing jobs. And Clinton essentially came in and said, "Look, I'm sorry, you got a raw deal, but you can't avoid the future. Instead of putting our heads in the sand, we're going to try and help you out by moving your communities onto a new path."

What did Trump do? He put on a miner’s helmet, went up on stage in front of an audience of 10000 people, and told them all that it was regulations that were shutting down the mines, that it was unfair that China was able to use coal, and that he would bring back tons and tons of coal jobs. "You're going to be proud of me, and for those miners, get ready, because you're going to be working your asses off." The speech is a good piece of showmanship, for sure.

So, Trump got elected and got rid of all of the regulations and coal mining shot way back up and everyone in WVa kept their jobs and the towns were all revitalized, right? RIGHT???

No, of course not!

You can’t even notice the Trump years on the trend line. Eight years later, total coal consumption is down ~50% from 2016, and ~70% from 2008. A lot of those coal towns are lifeless, abandoned. As Bloomberg dryly noted in 2020:

“You can only do so much as president of the United States,” said Nicholas Akins, chairman of Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric Power Co., one of many utilities replacing coal with renewable energy sources. “You really can’t fight the laws of economics and the laws of risk and the issues of development around new technologies.”

Clinton ended up losing WVa in 2016 by nearly 10% more than Obama in 2012. It was the lowest turnout for the Dems that the state had seen since at least the 70s. And the state has remained staunch Trump country ever since.

Even Kamala did better.

And that pattern held throughout coal country, whether in PA or Ohio or WVa or wherever.

It's reductive to say that the only reason the state went red in 2016 was because of this one moment. But still, it stuck out to me. Clinton got on stage and told the truth, a truth that no one wanted to hear, and she was slaughtered for it. And Trump got on stage, and lied his ass off, and coal country has been in his pocket ever since, even though they are all arguably worse off for it.

It's tempting to criticize the average West Virginian voter here. I believe the condescending-but-often-true lefty line is something like "these guys keep voting against their own interests." But, like, if you can put on your sympathy hats for a second, how is the average West Virginian voter supposed to know that?

The naive take is that the coal miners are motivated by something else beyond their economic interests — racial animus, bigotry, hate. The even more naive take is that the coal miners are simply too dumb to know what they should want. There are absolutely racists, and there are absolutely idiots, but in the vast majority of cases these simplistic explanations are straightforwardly untrue.

What is true is that the average coal miner does not have an economics degree. They are not particularly plugged into the news, probably even less than the already-shockingly-low American average. They are focused on living their lives and raising their families. A good friend of mine grew up in Dayton, Ohio; not quite Appalachia, but close enough. He told me that his mom recently asked him "Who is this elo person that everyone is mad at?" She didn't know who Elon Musk was! In 2025! The world's richest person, who has been in the news all 24/7 of the 24/7 news cycle, who literally bought the world's biggest megaphone to make sure everyone knew who he was!

So, in 2016, if you're a struggling coal miner who's about to vote, your choices are:

• The person who is saying that the President, the most powerful person on the planet, can't do anything to save your town for some esoteric reasons that may or may not be true;

• The person who says the first candidate is lying and that he will personally help you turn everything around.

You're going to choose the second guy every single time.

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The deeper point here: I increasingly believe the average voter is simply not equipped to know when a politician is blatantly lying to them. I'm not saying the average voter is dumb. I'm saying that it is unreasonable to expect that everyone will have the necessary context to pick apart what is truthful or not.

Like, take all this recent conversation about tariffs. On the one hand, you have a woman saying "tariffs are a tax on American consumers. Supply and demand means that US prices will go up. It will make Americans way poorer." And on the other side, you have a guy saying "Tariffs are taxes that other countries pay. Other countries have tariffs on the US and we have none on them. It's time to get them to pay their fair share, and it will make Americans way richer."

Without any prior understanding of economics, it is extremely difficult to evaluate which of these statements is true from first principles. You would have to reconstruct a lot of macro-economics before you could reach a solid answer. Most people are not going to reconstruct macro-economics from first principles. If we're unlucky, they'll vote more or less based on vibes or good old fashioned stereotyping. This is where we get things like "well, I trust him because he's a man of Jesus" or "she must be right due to her motherly instincts." If we're a bit more lucky, they're going to go to someone they trust to see what that person says about the whole thing.

Historically, the 'someone they trust' was Walter Cronkite, and the mainstream media in general.

Before 2016, it was virtually impossible for a really bad-faith actor to become a politician of any meaningful merit, because the rest of the country's elite simply wouldn't let them. The media wouldn't give airtime to people who were spouting blatant falsehoods, much less endorse them. So if you were an aspiring politician, you had to say things that were mostly right, or at least not off the wall batshit insane, such that you could piggy-back on the reach of the major news networks. You had to appease the Cronkites (or the Citizen Kanes) of the world, just so people would know they could trust you.

Obviously this is a bit of a rose-colored view of the past. I think you could argue that the media gave coverage to false things all the time. Certainly there were many media outlets that worked closely with the USG during the cold war and beyond. We're aware of several examples of media purposely reporting the government line by request.

But none of that even remotely compares to the world today, where we will regularly have Trump say things like "They're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats" or retweet things like "Joe Biden was executed in 2020 and replaced with a clone." The level of falsehood we're dealing with is far beyond even the most strained justifications.

What changed? I don't think the average voter has gotten 'worse', or 'less discerning' in some way. Instead, the media landscape got significantly worse. I think you can boil it down to just two words: Internet access.

The rapid decentralization of information and communication over the last two decades has had the following interwoven effects:

• Politicians are increasingly independent of media sources. They do not need to rely on other people's networks when they can simply build their own. As a result, there is no effective way to filter the crazy and the conspiratorial before they hit the mainstream.

• News sources have been decimated. Social media and the tech giants have effectively destroyed local and state news, leaving only a few national journalistic outlets that simply cannot cover everything and increasingly have financial incentives to worry about.

• Information feeds have polarized. Personalized algorithmic panopticons bucket people into smaller and smaller niches. Two people can get completely different reporting (or sometimes completely miss major events) resulting in fundamentally different world-models. This is exacerbated by the government reducing regulation on what can be presented.

• It is significantly easier to identify when people screw up, which in turn has resulted in the mass delegitimization of the expert class for altogether silly reasons (something I write about more here). Contrary to popular belief, I don't think experts are making more mistakes than they were previously. I do think those mistakes are way more visible, and it's a lot harder for institutions to police their members when everyone has a megaphone all the time.

Put a slightly different way, people on the left are getting a non-stop stream of racist police beating up innocent minority teens, dead and dying children in Gaza, and people on the right saying and doing terrible things (think Jeff Tiedrich). And people on the right are getting a non-stop stream of illegal immigrant murderers, violent urban decay, and people on the left saying and doing terrible things (think LibsOfTikTok).

It's easy to dismiss one headline of a racist cop or an immigrant murderer. But 10? 100? 1000? Scott Alexander called this out back in 2015, the Chinese Robber Fallacy:

There are over a billion Chinese people. If even one in a thousand is a robber, you can provide one million examples of Chinese robbers to appease the doubters. Most people think of stereotyping as “Here’s one example I heard of where the out-group does something bad,” and then you correct it with “But we can’t generalize about an entire group just from one example!” It’s less obvious that you may be able to provide literally one million examples of your false stereotype and still have it be a false stereotype. If you spend twelve hours a day on the task and can describe one crime every ten seconds, you can spend four months doing nothing but providing examples of burglarous Chinese – and still have absolutely no point.

If we’re really concerned about media bias, we need to think about Chinese Robber Fallacy as one of the media’s strongest weapons. There are lots of people – 300 million in America alone. No matter what point the media wants to make, there will be hundreds of salient examples. No matter how low-probability their outcome of interest is, they will never have to stop covering it if they don’t want to.

In the beginning, I was talking about the prototypical coal miner in a vacuum, a sort of 'brain in a vat' that was evaluating Clinton's and Trump's statements without any prior context. But in fact, said coal miner has a lot of prior context. It's just all Fox News. The coal miner's baseline assumption is that Clinton won't do anything because she's corrupt, the Dems are corrupt, the establishment is corrupt. After all, that's what he's been hearing basically non-stop for years. He has dozens, if not hundreds, of examples to back up that assumption. How do you explain that those assumptions and all of those examples are wrong? Clinton never had a chance, the deck was stacked against her before she ever opened her mouth.

O, by the way, my friend's Mom from Dayton watches Fox News constantly. She doesn't know who Elon is because Fox never reports on him in a way that reaches her.

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There's a substack post that's been making the rounds recently. It's called "Missouri MAGA Mommies Didn’t Vote For Trump To Deport This One Immigrant They Like!" It's more or less what you'd expect from the title:

Donald Trump won 80.5 percent of the vote in Dunklin County, where Kennett is. Kamala Harris won 18.8 percent. It’s that kind of red county.

But much of the town and county are rallying around Carol Hui, an immigrant from Hong Kong who’s been in the U.S. for two decades, who works at the John’s Waffle and Pancake House in Kennett. She was recently called into a strange, seemingly random, but mandatory immigration check-in in St. Louis. Her partner, a Guatemalan immigrant, thought it was weird. When she got there, Trump’s immigration thugs lied to her and said they were going to help her get a passport. They kidnapped, I mean, abducted, I mean “detained” her, and now they’re going to deport her, leaving her partner, children and community behind.

And many of the people in Kennett are like Oh shitfuck, I didn’t mean for the leopards to eat CAROL’S face!

“I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” said Vanessa Cowart, a friend of Ms. Hui from church. “But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves.”

Yes, Ms. Cowart, you in fact did vote for that. Better you grapple with that one sooner than later.

…

Let us clearly say that MAGA people like that can go fuck themselves. Those are the ones to whom we need to say, yes, you bigoted motherfucker, this is EXACTLY what you voted for, and if you ever wish to atone for that on Earth before God dropkicks you into the fiery depths of hell, then it’s time to rip off the Band-Aid and confess what you do every time you enter a voting booth.

The article is angry, and rightfully so. I get it. I have several such posts in my drafts. The Trump admin is doing real damage, and hurting real people, and you do not get to claim absolution if you knew what was going to happen and are just annoyed that some of the piss blew back in the wind.

But I'm not convinced these people knew what was going to happen. When Ms. Cowart, above, says that "we were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs," I believe her.

Nearly 21% of Kennett, Missouri lives under the poverty line. The national average is 12%. Only 15% of the town has a Bachelor's degree. The national average is 35%. Already, we are talking about a population that has significantly less access to resources — including education — than the rest of the country.

And, like, a lot of folks in the heartland don't even see other political narratives.

Lucas Kunce, a progressive Dem, ran for Senate against Josh Hawley in Missouri. From his substack:

Being outspent and not having the same backup that Hawley got meant we had to target our spending to just four of Missouri’s ten media markets, largely on TV and digital — the need to both get our message out and defend ourselves on air in those four media markets made it impossible to afford things like a proper mail program or rural radio.

What are the odds that little Kennett, Missouri, population 10k, even got a pamphlet from Lucas?

It's easy to blame people for "voting against their interests," especially when that message is coming from wealthy educated 20-somethings living in massive urban centers like NYC and SF. It's hard to remember that we are all constantly being subjected to finely tuned machine-driven news feeds that are purpose built to destroy our critical thinking, and that many people did not have the ability to get a liberal arts education specifically geared towards improving critical thinking. Fox News is a multi-billion dollar media behemoth that has consistently been the most watched cable news network for over two decades. It has catastrophized illegal immigration with lurid stories of criminals and gang members non-stop for the past decade. All 18 of those Fox News stories that I linked landed in the last month. Of course Ms. Cowart thinks that illegal immigration and rampant gang violence are massive problems! It would be a miracle for her to believe otherwise! Fox has the same “Chinese Robber” strategy with stories of urban decay, or with welfare recipients, or voter fraud. A veritable flood of exaggerated and spun bullshit, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Lefties love to point out that education attainment is strongly correlated with voting liberal — that is, people with more years of schooling are more likely to be Democrats. Empirically, it's true. If you had to have a college degree to vote, Kamala would have won in 2024 by a landslide. Meanwhile, the never-attended-college crowd broke for Trump in unprecedented numbers.

One interpretation is that the Democrats are just more right about the world. And in 2024, I think this was 100% correct. None of the Trump supporters I know believe Trump is, like, an honest well adjusted individual. They all think he's a selfish sleazebag who has crazy ideas and is fundamentally wrong about everything. They knew the tariffs were crazy, that attacking Ukraine was crazy, that going after Canada and Greenland and Panama was crazy. They just incorrectly believed Trump was all bark and no bite, and many of them regret their choice to vote for him.¹

But another interpretation of these numbers is that folks without a college degree are more likely to buy into right wing information sources. There's a lot of reasons why that may be true. The one that seems most obvious to me is that Fox News and other right-aligned media are much more willing to push conspiratorial junk that sounds convincing even if it is obviously wrong. The NYT will post a single article with statistics; Fox will post 1000 articles, all anecdata, selected to be as enraging as possible and completely devoid of larger context. Never forget that Fox argued in court that it was an entertainment network instead of a news network, and that "Fox News' internal communications…indicated that prominent hosts and top executives were aware the network was reporting false statements but continued doing so to retain viewers for financial reasons."

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It’s tempting to believe that if you just introduce people to factual information, they will automatically see the correctness of your position and change their mind. Sweet summer child. Anyone who has spent more than 2 seconds on the internet knows that this is a fool’s errand.

The problem isn’t the quality of the information. It’s that they don’t trust you.

Broadly, everyone has an “epistemology” — that is, a way of acquiring knowledge and incorporating it into my model of the world. It is extremely difficult for people to realize when they have a problem with their epistemology. It’s sorta like having a bug in a bug report form. The point of having trusted, credentialed second opinions is to help validate what is true and what is false. Who do you turn to when you need to validate those second opinions?

I wrote about this extensively here.

Quoting from that piece:

To a first approximation, epistemology asks "who or what should I trust for information?" This is a tough question to answer! You don't, like, come out of the womb knowing to trust Fox News, the local parish priest, or Neil DeGrasse Tyson. You're born trusting your eyes and ears and your parents, and that's more or less it.

You could imagine a world where the only way people gathered new information was directly through what they could experience themselves. I imagine primitive humans more or less did just that. But relying on yourself is extremely limiting. If you had to personally verify whether every plant was poisonous or every animal edible, you'd probably end up dying pretty quick. Much better to go ask a trusted friend in the village, maybe someone who spends a lot of time only thinking about flora and fauna, whether these new berries you found are going to be delicious or give you a horrible bout of dysentery. This is the basic idea behind credentials — the village gets together and agrees that Bob is the medicine guy, you go to Bob for any medicine questions, and anyone else who has opinions about medicine can take a hike. Bob's word carries weight, because he's spent a lot of time thinking about things related to medicine, or whatever, and you presumably haven't, so if Bob says don't eat the berries you don't eat the berries.

…

I used to think that factual disagreements could be resolved relatively easily. If one person says "I believe there are 10,000 people living in Brooklyn" and another person says "I believe there are 100,000 people living in Brooklyn", you both go look at the census and you can figure out the answer. That kind of interaction doesn't happen anymore. The reason we're having so many more factual disagreements these days is because the credentials of the fact finding institutions are in question. If someone thinks the census is fundamentally untrustworthy and ideologically captured, and instead prefers trumps-discount-census.ru, you're kinda fucked! You can't reach any kind of consensus because your epistemologies are fundamentally different. And neither of you have the ability to like, go out and actually do a census yourself — if you can agree on a common definition for what a census even is.

People make decisions about what information sources to trust all the time. It’s hardwired into our brains as a vital life skill. If Xi Jinpeng or Vlad Putin put out a statement about how great the Chinese/Russian economies are doing, or how terrible America is, or why we really need to get rid of Democracy and replace it with some form of authoritarianism, I would more or less ignore that information before engaging with whether or not it is accurate. I just don’t trust Jinpeng or Putin to give me honest information! By contrast, if Scott Alexander wrote about why we really need to get rid of Democracy, I would at least be intrigued enough to read the piece. That’s because I trust Scott to give me a read on the world, and I don’t trust Jinpeng or Putin more than I can throw them. It would take a lot of evidence for me to trust something Putin says, and it would take a lot of evidence for me to distrust something Alexander says.

Unfortunately, the same basic premise applies to Sean Hannity, or Tucker Carlson. Lots of people in the country trust these people to tell them about the world.

There is such a thing as a ‘good’ epistemology and a ‘bad’ epistemology. The former is characterized by extensive mechanisms to avoid confirmation and selection bias, and often explicitly encourages critique. Peer reviewed journals and transparent publications are both reasons to trust in the scientific establishment, for example. But bad epistemological habits are self reinforcing and self defending. If Sean Hannity gets on air and says “whatever you do, do not trust anyone with a college degree,” what do you think will happen?

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If you take what I'm saying above seriously, it paints a devastating picture for the future of non-partisan media.

First, there are extremely strong incentives for politicians to just lie, constantly. Saying outrageous soundbites seems guaranteed to drive more voters than anything that is even remotely wonkish, even if the latter is correct. Trump obviously utilizes this to a great degree. The one possible check on his ability to spew nonsense is the conscience of other media outlets and the journalists who staff them. It should not be lost on anyone that Truth Social, Trump's alternative media platform, came into existence only after his 2020 loss.

Second, there are extremely strong incentives to take over and corrupt whatever sources of information people are downstream of. "You are what you eat"; there's a reason it's called an information diet. If more people are consuming right wing media, the right will continue to win; and vice versa for the left. In fact, I'll go one step further: the modern election is entirely predicated on the media sources that people are consuming. This makes controlling the distribution and content of media absolutely vital.

And, as succinctly put by Media Matters, "the right dominates the online media ecosystem."

None of these people are journalists in the traditional sense of the word. They are 'influencers' more than anything else. Even more than Fox, these guys are entertainers with a financial motive. And yet they clearly have massive reach.

Also, like, we have to address the other elephant in the room. I'm loath to claim that Elon is making 12d chess moves. I think he bought Twitter more or less by accident, tried to get out of it, and then was forced into completing the purchase. And yet, it has to be said: in addition to pocketing the most watched cable news network and having ubiquitous internet dominance, the Trump coalition also explicitly and directly owns two extremely successful social networks, one of which has a built in AI that is being trained to parrot right-wing talking points. Arguably three social networks, given that Chinese-owned TikTok is very Trump friendly as well.

So to recap, Trump owns the infrastructure. Trump owns the networks. Trump owns the content. All that's missing now is a Trump branded phone and operating system, or maybe a Trump official ISP.

In the face of this overwhelming media dominance, some folks on the left are proposing that Democrat messaging needs to change. "Dem policies are too unpopular!" they say. "Dems lost because they couldn't present a compelling vision! If we just shift to a more popular message, everything will come up daisies." This is the "Abundance" crowd.

There is, of course, some sense in which this position has to be correct. It is tautologically true that having a more popular position will be more popular. But, nonetheless, I think this approach is missing the forest for the trees. If everyone in the country was bombarded 24/7 with videos and images of Republican cops beating up innocent children and Democrat teachers feeding the homeless, Kamala would have won regardless of policy. Academics and think-piece writers call this the 'post truth world' for a reason — if you can make up your own version of the truth by selectively distributing things that make you look great and your opponents look terrible, we shouldn't be surprised that the average person believes you are great and your opponents are terrible! It's just a politically weaponized version of the Chinese Robbers effect.

And either accidentally or on purpose, the MAGA Right has figured out that controlling the information source is way more important than having any kind of coherence. Trump could barely string two sentences together even during the campaign! Any 'concept of a plan' that he put forward was hilariously, woefully underspecified. And the parts that we did get, even on the campaign trail, were really horrendously bad. But it doesn't matter if most people never see your gaffes, only your opponent's. The strength of the MAGA disinformation machine is such that folks in Idaho keep campaigning on illegal immigration, even though only 5% of Idaho is any kind of immigrant, legal or not. Most people in Idaho never even meet someone from another country. Doesn't matter, they're all convinced illegal immigration is a massive problem. Just like Ms. Cowart.

The title of this post is 'fix the root, not the fruit'. In 2025, trying to improve the content of a political party's messaging is like trying to improve the fruit of a tree after bloom. It can't really be done. It's too late. Harvest what you can and plan for the next season.

Dem party operatives need to go a few steps back in the information flow, down to the roots. They need to think about owning their own networks, owning their own personalities, and treating this game more like a media empire than a political campaign. Throughout 2024, Kamala kept going "I'm the only candidate with a policy to do…" not realizing that her policies didn't matter because they were never reaching any ears. That needs to change.

There needs to be a real answer to the Fox News extended cinematic universe. There is simply no comparable set of media networks that collude so openly with the Democratic Party on the left, as on the right. Half of Trump's cabinet is former media personalities! Dem operatives should not be wondering how Kamala lost. They should be looking at the media landscape and wondering how she got so close in the first place. Their biggest priority now is to try and reclaim the narrative, especially in the digital sphere. If the entire country is listening to the Dem platform 24/7, the actual messaging come election time is sorta irrelevant. Everyone is already primed to believe you anyway.

Candidly, if I was in Democratic party leadership, I would be considering ways to directly partner with Alphabet and Meta and Reddit, OpenAI and Anthropic, every Youtube creator and Twitch streamer, every independent network out there. I would be offering tech and media moguls cabinet positions. I would start going down that media list up top to try and poach people one by one, starting with Rogan. I would try and regulate media platforms with misinformation requirements, state-by-state if necessary (luckily, I do think reality has a left-wing bias, so truthfulness inevitably benefits the Dems). And I would send my candidates through every right dominated platform to at least get their face in front of voters who wouldn't see them otherwise. Yes, even Fox. A hostile face-to-face interview is better than no political presence at all, where your opponents just own the entire story end to end (something that Buttigieg seems to understand).

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For what it's worth, everything I just wrote sucks. I don't think anyone wants this kind of polarization. I don’t want this kind of polarization. Voters want to make good decisions. Politicians (mostly) want to do good things. People want to have media sources that they can depend on. A lot of journalists want to provide good reporting. But things keep getting worse. Every day, I see a thread on hackernews or substack lamenting the current political climate. "How can we fix this?" asks the moderate. "How can we unwind this tension without something going boom?"

Again, 'fix the root, not the fruit'. The only way to unwind this is to put away the weapons. That means bi-partisan government legislation that regulates how social media and news platforms can be leveraged for campaigning and politics. I don't have any belief that either Dem or GOP controlled governments will go for this until they both think these tools are too dangerous for the other side to have. So I expect polarization and politicization of everything to get even worse as both political parties push this new strategy to the extreme.

But if we do, by some miracle, get a Dem House and Senate, I would love to see a comprehensive policy package that defangs the worst of the collusion between the major media players and the political parties. I have a set of concrete policy proposals that I think are fairly unobjectionable, but that's another post for another time.

I'll leave off with one last thought. I've been thinking a lot about the phrase "There but for the grace of God go I." Epistemics is a hard thing to reason about. It is due to 'God's grace' that I was born to a family that cared about education and had the resources to provide it. If I was born in Kenneth, Missouri, would my current way of thinking guide me to the truth, even in the face of intense propaganda? Most of the time I think so, but sometimes I'm not so sure. I think it's important to push back on and even openly mock people who spew poorly reasoned misinformation everywhere. The Fox News hosts, the JD Vances, the Elons — the folks who are clearly acting out of cynical self interest should be denied and ridiculed wherever possible. But it is equally important to be forgiving to those Trump voters who realize they have been duped and are seeking truthful information. Even though it will be really really hard.

1. Not all! Some still think Kamala would have been worse.